CARTOGRAPHERS call it Mount Everest, after a British surveyor-general in India. Locals call it Chomolungma. There’s a Nepalese restaurant with that name in Griffith.

In 2006, Canberra filmmaker Jennifer Peedom worked on a TV series about Chomolungma. In 2008, she made a doco about Lincoln Hall’s survival after being left for dead on it after suffering altitude sickness. In 2014, she was in Nepal shooting another doco about sherpas whose main income nowadays is as pack animals transporting everything up the mountain for aspiring summiteers. And everything means every thing – tents, tables, toilet paper, towels, tea and teapots, TV sets, telecommunications gear and other stuff with names that don’t start with “t”. And when the eight-week climbing seasons end, Sherpas carry everything down.

On April 18, 2014, 16 sherpas died when an estimated 14,000-tonne ice block fell off the mountain. The opportunity that fell from that tragedy into Peedom’s lap became “Sherpa: Trouble On Everest”, built on a narrative framework involving Phurba Tashi who holds the summiting record (22 times). Those passages, shot during the 12 days before the tragedy, are sensitive, charming and carefully optimistic.

The footage Peedom shot during the seven days after the disaster captures bleak fear and large-scale grief. The 2014 disaster inflated tension left over from 2013 when a loud-mouthed Yank used a word that is anathema to sherpas.

Her film mixes people, politics, climbing and environment into a powerful documentary. A significant component of it involves sherpas bailing up their employer between the rock of income and the hard place of working conditions.

From any aspect, Chomolungma’s beauty is breathtaking. Her pitiless treatment of humans with the temerity to clamber over her is frightening. Much of what sherpas carry up to Base Camp is for the comfort of clients – a sherpa gets a climber still in his tent started with a hot towel and hot drink; so much for roughing it during an adventure. During a meeting to protest against wages and conditions, an American climber calls sherpas terrorists. A delegation of politicians visits Base Camp to address that gathering, mouths platitudes then flies away.

Between its lines, “Sherpa” replaces the traditional reason for climbing any mountain – “because it’s there” – with one less commendable – “because Everest’s on my bucket list”. Chomolungma is indeed Nepal’s economic generator. No human has ever really conquered her. Pessimists with over-heated imaginations might regard Nepal’s earthquake record (324 in the past year!) as Chomolungma’s vengeance against the abuse, garbage and other indignities that climbers have heaped on her and the gentle people who worship her!

At Palace Electric